She isn’t a city, she’s a heartbeat—
restless, erratic, impossible to silence.
skies ripple, their tides like memory,
streets thrum with the weight of centuries.
Look left:
a forest brushing the edge of the divine,
temples rise from the bones of prophets,
creation spilling from the cracks:
a civilization
clambering from imperial decay.
Lebanon is built and rebuilt.
Beirut alone seven times—
like the heavens, and creation,
a city is ordained to rise.
Look right:
a world scorched and bleeding,
its veins lit with the flicker of tail lights,
its breath caught in the choke of exhaust.
This is the future we cannot outrun—
chaos wearing a neon crown,
a mother cradling ash.
And in between, the sea—
not blue, but black as the womb of the universe,
dotted with fishermen’s lights
that scatter like galaxies.
Beirut is a fever dream—
a city spinning on the edge of collapse,
people laughing louder than sirens,
loving in defiance of death.
We worship her,
not for what she gives,
but for what she refuses to lose.
Our Beirut:
a place where the end of everything
is just another rebirth,
where truth is sharpened by acid-
craw-busted colors bleeding,
walls breathing, unyielding,
fucked-up shattered beauty aching,
alive, demanding to be seen.
Artwork courtesy of our featured artist Ernest Williamson III, PhD
